Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

OTTAWA — The political furor over Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s use of a military helicopter escalated Tuesday as the official Opposition demanded he be removed from cabinet, saying he is “no longer fit” to be a minister of the Crown.

“He’s an embarrassment to the government, he’s an embarrassment to the prime minister, he’s an embarrassment to the whole country,” NDP interim leader Nycole Turmel said in the House of Commons. “And what do you say to an embarrassment? You say ‘good riddance.’”

But Prime Minister Stephen Harper continued to stand by MacKay, and analysts predict the government will settle into a waiting game in the hopes the issue will blow over in the next few weeks.

MacKay has acknowledged he used a Cormorant helicopter to leave a remote Newfoundland and Labrador fishing lodge in July 2010 to get to the Gander airport.

However, while the minister said the ride was entirely for government business and as part of a pre-planned military demonstration, Defence Department emails indicate the minister could have found alternative modes of travel, and that the demonstration was a “guise” designed to protect the minister from embarrassment should the pickup be discovered.

Since the emails became public last week, NDP defence critic David Christopherson had been demanding MacKay apologize. On Tuesday, he gave the minister what he said was a last chance.

TOKYO — A panel probing an accounting scandal at Japan's Olympus Corp. said Tuesday an elaborate scheme to cover up $1.5 billion of investment losses was orchestrated by a group of top executives who were "rotten to the core."

The panel also credited the company's ex-CEO, Michael Woodford, for bringing the deception at the camera and medical equipment maker to light. Woodford, a Briton, was fired in October after questioning the dubious transactions that have become one of Japan's biggest corporate fiascos.

Led by former Supreme Court judge Tatsuo Kainaka, the third-party panel found that as of 2003, Olympus had racked up 117.7 billion yen ($1.5 billion) in investment losses dating back to the 1990s.

"The management was rotten to the core and contaminated what was around it, creating in the worst sense a group mentality of the typical salarymen," the report said in a reference to Japan's culture of corporate loyalty.

It said it found no involvement of "anti-social groups," a euphemism for Japanese criminal gangs, as some news reports have speculated. The panel said it traced the money and the various funds used to cover up investment losses, and no underworld groups were involved.

Balance Transfer Day is not what it seems. The seemingly grassroots movement, which piggybacked on the success of November's Bank Transfer Day, is operated by a man who is paid to consult and write for both Credit-Land.com and BestCreditOffers.com, websites that make money when consumers successfully apply for credit cards.

Michael Germanovsky, 35, set up a Facebook page in November urging people to transfer their credit card balances to low-rate cards. On the page Germanovsky wrote, "Why don’t we beat the banks at their own game and demand the same 0% interest rate that they receive from the federal government?"

But Germanovsky isn't an activist working against big banks. He's a paid consultant and writer for Credit-Land and its sibling site BestCreditOffers, two so-called lead generator websites that push customers to products, in this case credit cards, via ads and special offers. (On his LinkedIn page Germanovsky claims to be editor-in-chief of Credit-Land, though in an interview he said it's "just a title.") Credit-Land and BestCreditOffers make money when consumers successfully open a new account.

SOUTH FULTON, Tenn. -- A Tennessee couple has lost everything after their home burned to the ground as firefighters watched and did nothing.

Vicky Bell told WPSD-TV that she called 911 when her mobile home in Obion County caught fire. Firefighters responded but did not put out the blaze because she does not subscribe to the local fire service.

Bell says she could "look out my mom's trailer and see the trucks sitting at a distance."

Rural residents who want fire protection can get service from the nearby town of South Fulton, but they must pay a $75-a-year fee. South Fulton Mayor David Crocker said that if the city's firefighters responded to people who didn't pay there would be no incentive for anyone to subscribe. He said firefighters will help when people are in danger, regardless of whether they have paid.

WASHINGTON -- Federal officials released a damning report Tuesday on the Upper Big Branch coal mining disaster, citing "corporate culture" at coal giant Massey Energy Co. as the "root cause" of a catastrophe that claimed 29 lives and rocked West Virginia last April.

The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) also imposed a civil fine of $10.8 million, the largest in agency history, and issued a whopping 369 citations and orders on the company, including an "unprecedented" 21 "flagrant violations" of safety and health standards. The mine had been operated by Performance Coal Co., a Massey subsidiary.

The result of a year and a half of investigation, the report provides the official federal record on what was the worst mining disaster on U.S. soil in four decades. Federal officials met with the families of victims Tuesday morning before releasing their findings to the general public. Officials described the 80,000-page report, which includes reams of testimony as well as internal company documents, as the most extensive investigation of a mining disaster in modern times.

"I call this closure for the investigative team," said Kevin Stricklin, MSHA's administrator of coal mine safety and health, in a call with reporters. "We don't know what the families go through. I don't walk in their shoes. I don't know that they'll ever have closure."

The report comes right on the heels of an announcement earlier today that the Department of Justice had reached an agreement with Massey's corporate parent, Alpha Natural Resources. The company has agreed to pay $210 million to avoid prosecution, including $1.5 million to each of the victim's families.

Though often blamed with making the calls that led the country to the brink of collapse, financial executives likely won't face criminal charges for their practices during the financial crisis, according to a former top U.S. investigator.

"There's been a realization and a more deliberate targeting by the Department of Justice before we launch criminally on some of these cases," Cardona told the WSJ.

Cardona's comments come nearly eight months after Senator Carl Levin released a report on Goldman Sachs' role in the financial crisis, which found the investment bank profited off purposefully deceiving its own clients at the height of the financial crisis. Levin then said he would recommend some of the investment bank's executives for possible criminal prosecution.

WASHINGTON -- Corporate America is sitting right on top of the solution to the nation's employment crisis, according to a new report from a group of University of Massachusetts economists.

If America's largest banks and non-financial companies would just loosen their death-grip on a chunk of the $3.6 trillion in cash they're hoarding and move it into productive investments instead, the report estimates that about 19 million jobs would be created in the next three years, lowering the unemployment rate to under 5 percent.

"There is no reason that the U.S. needs to remain stuck in a long-term unemployment crisis," Robert Pollin, lead author of the report and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute, said in a statement accompanying the report's release Tuesday.

"Getting the banks and corporations to move their hoards into productive investments and job creation requires carrots and sticks -- policies such as a new round of government spending stimulus as well as taxes on the banks' excess reserves -- that can both strengthen overall market demand and unlock credit markets for small businesses," Pollin said.

OTTAWA - Suzanne Laplante Edward awoke one morning in October, on what would have been her daughter's 43rd birthday, only to see the Conservatives introduce a bill to end the gun registry.

That rude awakening made this Dec. 6 both personal and political for the still-grieving mother.

It was on Dec. 6, 1989, that a gunman burst into Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique, shot more than two dozen people and killed 14 women — including her daughter, Anne-Marie Edward.

Anne-Marie would have had three or four children by now; she would have been a successful engineer, Laplante Edward told hundreds of people gathered on Parliament Hill to remember the victims of the shooting.

Ensure her death won't be in vain, she urged them.

"We are about to lose a tool that is proven to save Canadian lives, to save women's lives, to save children's lives," she told the crowd Tuesday. "Please, please, do something."

Dollar figures will never tell the whole dispiriting story of Attawapiskat, Ont., of course, but you’ve got to start someplace.

For the federal government, it seems to me, there’s a straightforward question that must be answered right away, and another much more difficult one that demands longer-term vision. Money is at the core of both:

Firstly, how much would it take to fix the housing crisis, in Attawapiskat and similar remote First Nations communities, if spending is properly managed for a change?

Secondly, is more needed to provide a decent life in remote reserves , or is current funding sufficient if it isn’t squandered, or is the whole notion of trying to sustain these communities a mistake?

The first question is tricky enough, but obviously the second is far more fraught.

Stephen Harper seemed to be mixing up the two when he tossed out the figure $90 million as overall federal spending in the community of about 1,700 since the Tories came into office in 2006.

The chief of the troubled Attawapiskat First Nation received a standing ovation at an Assembly of First Nations meeting in Ottawa Tuesday, telling her fellow leaders, "We’re not going to take it no more.”

In a rambling but emotional speech, Theresa Spence said her First Nation had done its homework and fulfilled its obligations, but her people were suffering and even dying during a long-running crisis.

“Our grandfathers signed the treaty to build up a relationship and build up a nation together,” she said.

“We must tell the government, this is our land, this is our life.… We need to say, enough is enough. Respect the treaty and honour the treaty as we did.… And I’m asking the chiefs to tell the government that what was done to Attawapiskat First Nation … we’re not going to take it no more.”

Spence said she met with Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan on Monday and explained how her declaration of an emergency had come about, with conditions that were still unaddressed two years after a sewage backup that damaged homes and the health of people in her community. She attributed three deaths to the effects of that crisis.

Spence said she was “shocked” at the government’s decision to put the community under third-party management. “We’re not going to tolerate this childish behaviour from the government when we ask for assistance.”

A broad coalition of Muslim leaders, some of them shaken by allegations emanating from the Shafia family murder trial, have seized on the Dec. 6 anniversary of the killings at Montreal’s École Polytechnique to speak out about violence against women.

As a first step, it encourages imams to address the issue during Friday prayers.

Sikander Ziad Hashmi, an imam at the Islamic Society of Kingston, helped organize the initiative. He said he was affected by the trial of Mohammad Shafia, his second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya and his son Hamed, who are accused of killing Mr. Shafia’s first wife and three daughters. The Crown contends they were killed in a plot to preserve the family’s honour.

Michaëlle Jean is urging women to speak out and break their silence on the violence they face in an effort to eradicate it completely.

“We lift our voices in a powerful call of action to declare to the nation that violence against women must be eliminated,” the former governor-general told a group of about 300 women at an Ottawa conference Tuesday morning.

It was a passionate speech peppered with stories of women who have overcome – and some who have not – violence perpetrated by men. She also delivered a hopeful message: that words are powerful and can make a difference whereas silence will not.

“Women’s rights are not special rights; women’s rights are human rights,” Ms. Jean said. “To me denying more than half of the world’s population the most basic human rights, including the right to live in security, is the most flagrant form of subjugation and one of the worst scandals of our time.”

A Liberal MP says an organized campaign to undermine him is costing taxpayers money.

For weeks, Irwin Cotler has been lamenting the so-called phantom phone calls organized by Conservatives, in which his Montreal riding constituents are told he's about to resign.

Now he's denouncing the Tories for hiring – as an employee of the Government of Canada – a man he calls a “shadow MP.”

He says the Tory candidate he defeated in the last election, now employed in the office of Heritage Minister James Moore, is performing the duties of a member of Parliament.

The veteran Liberal says Saulie Zajdel is offering to help municipal politicians in his Montreal riding secure federal grants and services.

“We have had information conveyed to us that, in fact, he has had meetings with mayors and councillors in this riding, in which he has held out to them that he, in the course of his work, can confer a benefit upon them,” Mr. Cotler told reporters Tuesday.

The chief of the Northern Ontario reserve who declared a state of emergency over the living conditions of her people is calling on first-nations leaders across Canada to oppose the federal government's imposition of a third party to manage her community's finances.

Chief Theresa Spence told a meeting of chiefs from across Canada Tuesday that “it's time to get really aggressive with the government.”

It's time to tell Ottawa that first nations aren't going to take it any more, Ms. Spence said. “It's always their terms, not our terms.”

The people of Attawapiskat kicked out the third-party manager when he arrived on Monday. The Conservative government sent him to the community after the Red Cross went there to provide emergency assistance.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan have pointed out that the community of fewer than 2,000 people, has received more that $90-million in federal funds since 2006 and they allege there have been some accountability issues.

But Ms. Spence says she has provided a comprehensive account of the spending, which has gone to a myriad of things including health care, education and social programs. “It's time to tell the government to stop it,” she said, “and really work with us, not to blame anybody.”

When Ontario’s auditor-general has trouble figuring out what’s on a hydro bill, what hope do the rest of us have?

Jim McCarter has picked apart the entrails of Ontario’s electricity system and told us earlier this week that they don’t make a pretty picture. Or even an understandable one.

For example, he explained Monday that about 60 per cent of the energy cost of your hydro bill doesn’t come from the market.

Instead, it comes from an amalgam of special out-of-market contracts, make-up fees for exporting surplus power at a loss, supplemental payments to provide back-up power, and other charges cooked up by energy companies and bureaucrats in closed rooms.

And he threw a cold dose of reality on the idea that long-term retail contracts provide price protection for ratepayers. In McCarter’s view, they cost much more than they deliver.

This morning in Durban, South Africa, a group of youth and indigenous activists from Canada gave delegates to the U.N. climate talks mock gift bags containing samples of fake tar sands along with tourism brochures for Canada and Canadian flags. Kandi Mossett, one of the activists participating in the action, says Canada’s reliance on tar sands oil "is the largest catastrophic project that I am aware of on earth right now." Mossett, who is the Native Energy and Climate Campaign organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, notes that the tar sands extraction process is energy- and water-intensive, emits immense amounts of pollution into the air, and destroys the landscape. "To even get to the tar sands, they have to remove boreal forest, old-growth forest. And they call it overburden. They just scrape it off and get rid of that, and then they dig down and move so many tons of earth," Mossett says. "And then they squeeze out the last little 10 percent of oil that’s actually in the sand. And then they have to use chemicals to make it liquid enough to be able to put it through the pipelines. It’s much more toxic than any other kind of, you know, sweet crude oil."

One of Britain's largest lobbying companies has been secretly recorded boasting about its access to the heart of the Government and how it uses the "dark arts" to bury bad coverage and influence public opinion. An undercover investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, published in The Independent today, has taped senior executives at Bell Pottinger:

* Claiming they have used their access to Downing Street to get David Cameron to speak to the Chinese premier on behalf of one of their business clients within 24 hours of asking him to do so;
* Boasting about Bell Pottinger's access to the Foreign Secretary William Hague, to Mr Cameron's chief of staff Ed Llewellyn and to Mr Cameron's old friend and closest No 10 adviser Steve Hilton;
* Suggesting that the company could manipulate Google results to "drown" out negative coverage of human rights violations and child labour;
* Revealing that Bell Pottinger has a team which "sorts" negative Wikipedia coverage of clients;
* Saying it was possible to use MPs known to be critical of investigative programmes to attack their reporting for minor errors.

There are all sorts of reasons why HSBC's mis-selling of long-term care bonds wasserious enough to warrant the largest fine ever levied by the Financial ServicesAuthority on a retail bank, though just one of them says it all. The bank routinely sold savings plans with a five-year investment horizon to elderly customers who did not expect to live for as long as five years.

This is one of those cases where one wonders how City regulators everallowed them to get away with it, soobvious do the transgressions seem. Worse, HSBC might still be getting away with it today as far as the Financial Services Authority is concerned, for it was the bank that brought the problem to the attention of the regulator, rather than vice versa.

The regulator said yesterday that the size of its fine "should serve as a warning to firms". Well, maybe, though £40m (the cost of the penalty plus compensation for those affected) is loose change in the context of the £11.8bn profit that HSBC made during 2010 alone. A more useful deterrent would be regulatory action against some of the individuals concerned.

To start with, what has happened to the financial advisers who used to work for the HSBC subsidiary at the centre of this scandal, NHFA? Since these salesmen and women ruthlessly exploited vulnerable customers over a five-year period, it would be good to know they are now prevented from behaving in similar fashion at another company – the FSA can offer us no reassurance that this is the case. None of them has faced personal disciplinary action.

The revelations have increased pressure for the Government to introduce a statutory register of lobbyists.

Conservative backbencher Jesse Norman said that the latest disclosures reaffirmed his view that lobbying was a “canker on the body politic”.

"There is a huge need for greater transparency and integrity and honesty in the relationships between different business organisations and politicians. This casts both sides in rather a bad light," he told BBC Radio 4's The World at One.

Labour MP John Cryer, who is tabling a backbench bill on lobbyists, said the system should be opened up and made properly transparent.

"You have got the panzer divisions, as one Tory MP once described them, of big business bringing the heavy artillery to bear on government. It is not open, it is not transparent, people don't know what's going on," he told The World at One.

"It is a cosy club at the centre of government seemingly being influenced in making decisions without any sort of accountability."

In the 14th century there were two pandemics. One was the Black Death, the other was the commercialisation of warfare. Mercenaries had always existed, but under Edward III they became the mainstay of the English army for the first 20 years of what became the Hundred Years war. Then, when Edward signed the treaty of Brétigny in 1360 and told his soldiers to stop fighting and go home, many of them didn't have any homes to go to. They were used to fighting, and that's how they made their money. So they simply formed themselves into freelance armies, aptly called "free companies", that proceeded around France pillaging, killing and raping.

One of these armies was called the Great Company. It totalled, according to one estimate, 16,000 soldiers, larger than any existing national army. Eventually it descended on the pope, in Avignon, and held him to ransom. The pope made the mistake of paying off the mercenaries with huge amounts of cash, which only encouraged them to carry on marauding. He also suggested that they move on into Italy, where his arch-enemies, the Visconti, ran Milan. This they did, under the banner of the Marquis of Monferrato, again subsidised by the pope.

Lord Bell has defended David Cameron's decision to raise his client's business concerns during a state visit by the Chinese prime minister, after he was reportedly asked to do so by Bell's lobbying company.

As the government faced criticism for allowing lobbyists to get too close to ministers, Bell did not deny claims that his lobbying and public relations firm contacted Downing Street to ask the prime minister to complain to Wen Jiabao about copyright infringement in China of products designed by Dyson, a client of Bell Pottinger.

"What happened with the copyright issue with the Chinese was in the national interest," Bell said.

Senior Bell Pottinger executives were caught on film by undercover reporters from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism pitching their services to fake representatives of the government of Uzbekistan. They said they managed to get the prime minister to raise Dyson's copyright issue with Wen during a state visit in June 2010.

"We were rung up at 2.30 on a Friday afternoon, by one of our clients, Dyson," Tim Collins, managing director of Bell Pottinger, said. "He said, 'we've got a huge issue. A lot of our products are being ripped off in China'.

The European commission could be empowered to impose austerity measures on eurozone countries that are being bailed out, usurping the functions of government in countries such as Greece, Ireland, or Portugal.

Bailed-out countries could also be stripped of their voting rights in the European Union, under radical proposals that have been circulating at the highest level in Brussels before this week's crucial EU summit on the sovereign debt crisis.

A confidential paper for EU leaders by the EU council president, Herman Van Rompuy, who will chair the summit on Thursday and Friday, said eurobonds or the pooling of eurozone debt would be a powerful tool in resolving the crisis, despite fierce German resistance to the idea.

It called for "more intrusive control of national budgetary policies by the EU" and laid out various options for enforcing fiscal discipline supra-nationally.

The two-page paper, obtained by the Guardian, formed the basis for discussions on an interim report tabled by Van Rompuy, the European commission and the Eurogroup of countries that have adopted the euro, which is to be debated on Wednesday among senior officials in an attempt to build a consensus ahead of the summit.

Today, Dec. 6, is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, marking the anniversary of the 14 women murdered at Montreal's École Polytechnique in 1989 by an armed gunman. The killer, who had a vendetta against feminists, entered a classroom, systematically separated out the women engineering students, shot them all, and then went on a rampage through the school, targetting more women and injuring 10 additional women and four men.

Like many others, I will remember those women today. I will also think about the murdered and missing women targeted on the Highway of Tears. At least 18 young women, most of them First Nations, have been killed or have disappeared along Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert since the 1990s. Other groups report that between 32-43 women have gone missing along the 700 kilometre stretch of highway since the late 1960s. The police have yet to solve any of the cases.

And I will reflect as well upon the women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside who were targetted by Robert Pickton and killed on his farm in Port Coquitlam. Pickton, currently serving a life sentence for the murders of six women, has been linked to the deaths of 33 women by DNA evidence, but may have killed at least 16 more, according to statements he gave to an undercover police officer.

NEW YORK - Bank of America has agreed to pay $315 million to settle claims by investors that they were misled about mortgage-backed investments sold by its Merrill Lynch unit.

The settlement was disclosed in court papers filed late Monday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan and requires the approval of a judge.

The class action lawsuit was led by the Public Employees' Retirement System of Mississippi pension fund.

The settlement represents another attempt by Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America Corp. to put its legal issues behind it. Just in the first half of the year, the bank put up $12.7 billion to settle similar claims from different groups of investors.

Last month Quebec's Minister of Justice, Jean-Marc Fournier, came to Ottawa to plead with the Conservative government to look at the evidence-based approaches to crime his province has pioneered. These approaches lead to safer communities. He explained that the C-10 "tough on crime" approach doesn't actually work. When accused by the Conservatives of being "soft on crime," the minister responded that this government was actually "tough on democracy."

From controlling which witnesses appear before parliamentary committees, to repeatedly cutting off debate, the Conservatives are using their majority status to silence the voices of the 60 per cent of Canadians that didn't vote for them and their elected representatives. It's a bad strategy. The government has the arithmetic on its side. They can afford to be generous and let the debate take place. Their bills will pass anyway. They should not be seen to be compounding bad legislation by shutting down the parliamentary process.

The late James Travers observed in a column in the Toronto Star that it has taken 500 years to wrestle power from the king and only 50 years to get the power back in one man's office. Historians and political scientists like the late Donald Savoie and Thomas Axworthy have documented the steady decline in the role of parliamentarians and the rise in power of the prime minister and the Prime Minister's Office.

As a Liberal, I know that the centralization of power began in the late '60s with Trudeau's PMO. His observation that MPs were nobodies within 50 yards from Parliament Hill was unfortunately made during a Conservative filibuster requesting rule changes in the House of Commons. David Collenette once observed that ministers who have never been backbenchers have trouble understanding that those pesky MPs are not trying to wreck the government's legislation -- they are really trying to improve it after listening to the thoughtful witnesses who come before their committees.

The Mounties want you to believe they take sexual harassment allegations seriously. But when you listen to Janet Merlo’s story, the RCMP’s oft-repeated declaration rings hollow.

In September, 2007, Constable Merlo wrote to then-RCMP commissioner William Elliott concerning plans under way to transfer her out of the B.C. detachment in which she was serving. In the note, she talked about a run-in she had with a supervisor because “I did not think his sexual advances were funny.”

She didn’t think the sex toys he was leaving on her desk were funny either.

“Yet I put up and shut up with the sexual harassment for the sake of the RCMP, but kept all the notes, dates and times in case the problem escalated,” she wrote to the commissioner. “That year, my assessment reflected his feeling about me not accepting his jokes and presents.

“How silly I was not to launch one of the biggest sexual harassment lawsuits the RCMP has ever seen in this province.”

Provocative allegations. Certainly ones you would think might have prompted the recipient to launch an immediate investigation. At the very least, a diligent and sensitive CEO would have quickly assured his employee that he was taking her claims seriously and that someone would be in touch to discuss them further.

Canada’s federal Privacy Commissioner, along with her provincial and territorial counterparts, has serious concerns regarding the federal government’s proposed lawful access legislation. These include the fact that the government has provided no evidence for the necessity of this expansion of state surveillance powers or why it requires departures from the standards of judicial oversight we usually apply when the police want access to private information. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has responded by throwing the phone book at them, including in a recent letter to The Globe.

Usually, if the state wants access to private information, our Constitution requires prior judicial authorization (a warrant) on a standard of reasonable and probable grounds. The point is not to prevent state access but to ensure that such access occurs within a framework of accountability and oversight. Some departures from this are tolerated, such as when the state interest goes beyond routine law enforcement or where there is a diminished expectation of privacy in the information.

What Mr. Toews seems to have in mind with his phone-book analogy is something like the following: The police can get access to the content of your telephone calls through a special warrant that receives our highest level of protection. The police can also get access to your incoming and outgoing telephone numbers by getting a warrant on a much lower standard of reasonable suspicion. Finally, the police can match people’s names and addresses to particular telephone numbers by using the phone book (ignore for a moment the fact that one can request an unlisted number).

The federal government is abandoning its practice of paying employment-insurance processors to work extra hours in December to handle an anticipated increase in claims and to ensure that jobless Canadians get their money before Christmas, the union that represents Service Canada employees says.

The reduction in overtime comes after 18,600 Canadians were thrown out of work last month and another 54,000 lost their jobs in October – the first back-to-back increases in the number of unemployed recorded since the recession of 2008 and 2009.

“Service Canada has allowed for EI processing agents to work overtime each and every year in the weeks leading up to the holiday season so that more families of the unemployed could have a somewhat festive season despite their circumstances,” said Steve McCuaig, the national executive vice-president of the Canada Employment and Immigration Union.

However, Mr. McCuaig said, “the word was officially given that there would be no overtime this year” and Service Canada employees say they have been told the same thing.

Alyson Queen, a spokeswoman for Human Resources Minister Diane Finley, who is responsible for Service Canada, said in an e-mail that overtime has not been “completely cancelled.”

The Canadian government has unveiled a $7.5-million plan to celebrate next year's 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's time on the throne, a moment hailed Tuesday by Heritage Minister James Moore as a "rare" chance to honour the 85-year-old monarch's "dedicated service to our country," and to give her subjects in Canada a refresher course on "the important role of the Canadian Crown."

As part of the anniversary preparations, Moore and Gov. Gen. David Johnston visited the Royal Canadian Mint in Ottawa to observe the striking of the first of 60,000 Diamond Jubilee medals, which will be awarded to civic-minded Canadians throughout 2012.

The death of King George VI from cancer on Feb. 6, 1952, instantly transformed a then-25-year-old Princess Elizabeth into the Queen of Canada, though her formal coronation took place more than a year later, in June 1953.

Major celebrations are also planned in Britain, including a public exhibition of famous artwork, jewels and other historic artifacts from the Royal Collection, and a planned armada of hundreds of decorated ships and boats on the Thames River.

MOSCOW — Police clashed Tuesday on a central Moscow square with demonstrators trying to hold a second day of protests against alleged vote fraud in Russia's parliamentary elections.

Hundreds of police had blocked off Triumphal Square on Tuesday evening, then began chasing about 100 demonstrators, seizing some and throwing them harshly into police vehicles.

Pro-government United Russia supporters also rallied late Tuesday at Revolution Square near the Kremlin. State television footage showed a crowd appearing to number in the thousands.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party saw a significant drop in support in Sunday's election but it will still have a majority in parliament. Opponents say even that watered-down victory was due to massive vote fraud.

In neighboring Lithuania, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton again criticized the Russian election and urged that widespread reports of voting fraud be investigated.

Some Moscow demonstrators Tuesday shouted "Putin is a crook and a thief!" referring both to the alleged election fraud and to widespread complaints that United Russia is one of the prime reasons for Russia's endemic corruption.

OTTAWA - The MP whose riding includes the troubled Attawapiskat First Nation says the federal government is provoking a political showdown with the reserve.

The NDP's Charlie Angus says it's no wonder the band council of the James Bay community turfed Ottawa's financial appointee on Monday.

He says the council sees the third-party manager as part of a deliberate attempt to divert attention from their housing crisis.

Angus says it's a power play that Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan then compounded with exaggerated claims in the House of Commons.

Duncan said Ottawa was sending supplies and emergency help, as well as the outside financial surveillance.

But Angus says the only extra supplies Ottawa has delivered are a couple of boxes of doughnuts that the third party manager brought with him when he tried — unsuccessfully — to set up shop in the community.

The Harper Conservatives model their economic policies on beliefs held dear by American Republicans: just lower taxes, and reduce government, and business will create the wealth.

With this approach, not only is income becoming less equal as the OECD just noted, Canadians and Americans are not becoming wealthier. The "give business a tax break" and the "let the invisible hand of the market do the rest" policies are not improving life for Canadians or Americans.

As creation of real full-time jobs dries up, and precarious employment increases, more Canadians and Americans drop out of the fabled middle class each year. The loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs has seen to that, along with union busting, and attacks on minimum wages, and unemployment insurance.

The increase in the percentage of women in the paid labour force since 1980 has been the means by which some Canadian and American families have held on to a standard of living that used to guaranteed by one unionized manufacturing wage.

The major corporations who dominate the world economy have been shifting production off-shore for three decades, replacing relatively well-paid employees in the U.S., and Canada with low-paid employees in Asia, and other low-wage jurisdictions. Low wages once meant off-shore incomes insufficient to absorb offshore production, leading to sluggish business conditions. But lower cost goods were welcomed in North America where chronic high unemployment, and low wages reduced family purchasing power.

In Vancouver, the Occupy Vancouver movement kicked off on Oct. 15, 2011, with a 4,000 demonstration through the city's financial district. The march then transitioned to set up camp with the permission and support of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Tents were immediately set up with the City of Vancouver insisting only that they not be staked into the ground. Other infrastructure was built to accommodate the needs of the site's residents.

Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson stated to the press he wanted Occupy Vancouver residents to leave, but said he did not want to force the issue, instead seeking a peaceful resolution. Occupy Vancouver became a mayoral election issue for which he was criticized, but Robertson eventually won.

On Saturday, Nov. 5, 2011, Ashlie Gough (age 23) of Victoria was found dead on site in her tent at around 4:40 p.m. A cause of death was determined to be an overdose of cocaine and heroin.

Former prime minister Paul Martin says the housing crisis in the First Nations community of Attawapiskat exemplifies the problems his abandoned Kelowna agreement on aboriginal quality of life was meant to address.

“The Kelowna accord was set up to deal with this very issue,” he said Tuesday in an interview with CBC News. “As well as with education, clean water, accountability and health care.”

In November 2005, Martin, the premiers and aboriginal leaders met in Kelowna, B.C., for the First Ministers Conference on Aboriginal Affairs. The meeting resulted in a five-year, $5-billion plan to improve the lives of First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples.

But within days, Martin’s minority Liberal government was defeated, triggering an election won by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.

“Unfortunately, the government simply walked away from agreements that had been made with the First Nations and aboriginal leadership and all of the provinces and territories. And they confiscated the $5 billion that the government set aside for it, and that was really most unfortunate. We lost five or six years,” said Martin.

As women across Canada mark the 22nd anniversary of the massacre at Montreal’s École Polytechnique on Tuesday, Conservative women on Parliament Hill continue to work to scrap the long-gun registry that was created in response to those shootings.

That has people on the Hill so upset that government MPs have been purposely shut out from officially speaking at and attending an event on Parliament Hill to honour the 14 young women who were shot dead in 1989.

The two opposition leaders, Interim NDP Leader Nycole Turmel and Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae, will be there to speak, as will Bloc Québécois MP Maria Mourani.

“Even as we mourn the 14 women killed at l’École Polytechnique, this government is taking the last remaining safeguard off the very weapon that murdered these women,” Ms. Turmel said. “The Conservatives are recklessly dismantling the only positive thing to come out of the tragic events of Dec. 6.”

The politicians will be joined by Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, and Suzanne Laplante-Edward, whose daughter, Anne-Marie, was killed by gunman Marc Lepine.

Toronto’s public school board will look at — and make public — how all the cuts proposed in the city budget to school pools, parks and recreation, and nutrition programs will negatively impact kids.

“People of this city will not tolerate this assault on children’s programming any more than they were willing to tolerate an assault on libraries,” said longtime trustee and former chair Sheila Ward at a committee meeting Monday night.

Toronto District School Board chair Chris Bolton said it’s important to get “facts and figures out there” so that communities know exactly how and how many kids such cuts will affect.

Under a proposed budget, the city is looking at eliminating programming at seven of the 33 school pools it operates, as well as after-school programming at 12 sites and support for school nutrition programs.

One of the most important questions to arise out of Washington over the past three years, and one that Democrats and defenders of the administration often dance around, is why big financial institutions haven’t been punished for their role in the mortgage crisis: for pushing bad loans beforehand and for engaging in shady foreclosure practices afterward. There has not been a single prosecution of a high-ranking executive nor Wall Street firm for playing a part in the meltdown.

Much of the analysis about the administration’s response to the global financial crisis focuses on the Dodd-Frank reforms, but that was a process in which the administration didn’t have total control—the legislation was subject to massive lobbying campaigns and horse-trading between members of Congress.

But the administration could have acted unilaterally to punish the big financial firms who helped create the crisis and push people out of their homes afterwards—and in large part, it hasn’t. We’ve noted before the pressure that the administration is placing on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to join a wide-ranging settlement with major banks over dubious foreclosure practices—one that would ask the banks to pay the meager sum of $20 billion to homeowners and investors, while granting them immunity from further prosecution. (Schneiderman has not yet relented).

What could be a better holiday gift for your reporter friend than Newt Gingrich becoming the frontrunner of the Republican presidential primary? Gingrich's ascendency offers the chance for a nostalgia tour through the 1990s, whether your reporter pals are old enough to remember Gingrich pouting over sitting at the back of Air Force One or so young that they stole furtive glances at their parents' copies of Newsweek as if the magazines were porn rags. The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza tweeted Monday, "EXCLUSIVE! Link to all the dirt on Newt," that link being to the site LetMeGoogleThatForYou.com and a simple search of "Newt Gingrich." But the truth is, Gingrich's oppo file takes pages and pages of Googling. When The Atlantic Wire tried to find all the world historical figures Gingrich had compared himself to, we were drowning in material -- and that's just one of Gingrich's rhetorical ticks. That's not even getting into the check-kiting scandal, his marriages, ethics investigations, ties to Jack Abramoff, or sex scenes in his historical novels.

Of course, it's not just reporters salivating at the thought of talking about Newt's greatest hits again -- Democrats can't quite believe their luck. In announcing his retirement, Rep. Barney Frank said, "I did not think I had lived a good enough life to be rewarded by Newt Gingrich being the Republican nominee. It still is unlikely, but I have hopes." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi seconded that, telling Talking Points Memo's Brian Beutler, "That quote I think spoke for a lot of us." Pelosi added this teaser: "One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich... I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff.”

Shortly before leaving the governor's office in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney's administration spent nearly $100,000 of state money to purge computer and email records in an unprecedented attempt to wipe out the paper trail of his tenure. His staff took home hard drives from state-owned computers and erased emails and other communications from state servers, complicating current efforts to retrieve and review the records of Romney's four-year term that ended in 2007.

It is not believed that Romney violated any laws, but according to state officials who spoke to Reuters, the move to scrub the digital archive of his administration was unusually thorough. Several members of his staff used their own money to purchase the hard drives of their state computers so that they could take them home after leaving their jobs. The staff also broke an existing lease on office equipment so that they could rent new "clean" computers at the end of their run, a move that cost the state $97,000 in additional funds.

Romney claims that whatever record remains of his time in office — including possible details of what was erased — are not subject to state disclosure laws. However, like regulations governing the destruction of digital records, Massachusetts law is vague on what is and isn't allowed. The court ruling most likely to cover any disclosure ruling is from 1997 (well before most state business was done on email) and the state's official records law has not been updated to deal with digital records, meaning Romney could benefit from Massachusetts' failure to adapt to the 21st Century.

The loss or potential sealing of Romney's Massachusetts records could become a huge issue in 2012, should he secure the Republican nomination. Those were the only four years that Romney ever spent in public office and how he ran his state will be a focal point of scrutiny for both voters and the media, particularly when it comes to the passage of his state health care law. Several news organizations are already working through freedom of information requests in the hope of combing through the historical record, but any legal complications regarding the release of those records — or the fact that many of them no longer exist — could delay any formal accounting of Romney's tenure until it's too late to make any difference. Sounds like that's just the way he would like it.

Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust, and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), biggest fire ever in New Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history (3,697,000 acres).

The fires were a function of drought. As of summer's end, 2011 was the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat. It was the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.

Virtually every city in the region experienced unprecedented temperatures, with Phoenix, as usual, leading the march toward unlivability. This past summer, the so-called Valley of the Sun set a new record of 33 days when the mercury reached a shoe-melting 110º F or higher. (The previous record of 32 days was set in 2007.)

And here's the bad news in a nutshell: if you live in the Southwest or just about anywhere in the American West, you or your children and grandchildren could soon enough be facing the Age of Thirst, which may also prove to be the greatest water crisis in the history of civilization. No kidding.

Last Thursday in New York City, a soft-spoken man with a thick beard, whom I'll call Paul, casually approached a brick apartment building and broke off a padlock with a bolt cutter. A spotter called to say a squad car was on its way, but Paul didn't feel his phone vibrate; he was too busy jamming a crowbar in the door. "Fortunately, the cop car just drove up the street and turned," he recalls a few days later as he and his wife wait at a subway stop to meet up with members of his cleanup crew. He'd installed his own lock on the door, which led to a vacant unit where the crew hoped to install a family of squatters.

Paul has asked me not to publish the names of his crew, the location of the building, or too much detail about the single mother who wants to squat there with her two children. The family was evicted from its apartment two weeks ago after a city-subsidized housing program ran out of money. "The reason I am doing this," Paul told me, "is that there are people who are really hurting."

After three guys in work clothes showed up with brooms and a shovel, we headed through graffiti-sprayed streets to the building. Everyone would need to be as discreet as possible; a neighboring unit was still occupied by a legal tenant. "The idea is to go in very quickly and confidently, like we are supposed to be there," Paul tells the group, one of several crews connected to a new 200-member squatting organization known as Organizing for Occupation (O4O).

A few weeks after the Occupy Wall Street protests began, we found ourselves having a random conversation with a couple of San Franciscans at a store counter. What were these kids going on about? they asked. Time was tight, the inquiry a pleasantry, really. Best to keep it simple. "Jobs, the economy, income inequality." Well, one offered, he knew the wife of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, and according to him, the reason companies aren't hiring is because they are worried about the extra cost of Obama's health care reform.

Stunned silence.

Because what can you really say to that, except…let them eat cake? Stumpf made $17.6 million in 2010—672 times what the average American takes home. And say what you will about Obamacare, but for large companies that already offer health benefits, it imposes pretty much zero costs and might even save money.

A few weeks after the Occupy Wall Street protests began, we found ourselves having a random conversation with a couple of San Franciscans at a store counter. What were these kids going on about? they asked. Time was tight, the inquiry a pleasantry, really. Best to keep it simple. "Jobs, the economy, income inequality." Well, one offered, he knew the wife of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, and according to him, the reason companies aren't hiring is because they are worried about the extra cost of Obama's health care reform.

Stunned silence.

Because what can you really say to that, except…let them eat cake? Stumpf made $17.6 million in 2010—672 times what the average American takes home. And say what you will about Obamacare, but for large companies that already offer health benefits, it imposes pretty much zero costs and might even save money.

It's no secret that many multinationals have become particularly adept at exploiting tax loopholes. Nor is it a surprising that the U.S. federal deficit is widening as a result. What's not as publicized, however, is that developing nations are also feeling the heat.

Between 2005 and 2007 in sub-Saharan African countries alone, nearly $27 billion was shifted illegally due to trade mispricing -- or when companies manipulate trade access borders for profit -- the report found. But multinational corporations are also using legal means to pay less in taxes, including setting up subsidiaries and administrative units in countries with near-zero tax rates and allocating the value of what the company creates to the most favorable region.

The report mirrors others indicating that many multinational corporations are getting increasingly skilled at avoiding taxes. Nearly 300 of America's most profitable corporations paid an average tax rate of 18.5 percent between 2008 and 2010, according to an October study from Citizens for Tax Justice. That's compared to the actual corporate tax rate of 35 percent, nearly double the rate actually paid.

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Issuing new warnings to two U.S. partners Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized Russia for a parliamentary election she said was rigged and said election gains by Islamist parties must not set back Egypt's push toward democracy after the fall of autocrat Hosni Mubarak this year.

She acknowledged the success of Islamist parties in Egyptian parliamentary voting that the U.S. has praised as fair. But many of the winners are not friendly to the United States or U.S. ally Israel, and some secular political activists in Egypt are worried that their revolution is being hijacked. Islamist parties are among the better-known and better-organized in Egypt, and while they were expected to do well in last week's first round voting, a hardline bloc scored surprisingly large gains.

Clinton addressed head-on the fear that the hardliners will crimp human and women's rights.

The federal government's omnibus crime bill passed the final vote 157-127 in the House of Commons on Monday night.

Earlier Monday, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson held a news conference in Ottawa to express his support for the proposed legislation and encouraged all MPs to vote in favour of it.

The Conservatives promised during the spring election to pass the Safe Streets and Communities Act within 100 sitting days of Parliament and Nicholson said the government is keeping its promise. He introduced the omnibus bill, a combination of nine previous bills, in September.

"Canadians voted in favour of this when they elected us to a majority government and we will deliver on the promises that we made to Canadians in the last election," Nicholson said.

The crime bill will now be put in the hands of the Senate, where the Conservatives also hold a majority.

Canada's plan for an Office of Religious Freedom raises important questions about what we understand the concept of 'religious freedom' to be.

Of late, the topic of religious freedom has been much in the air. During the 2011 federal election, the Conservatives promised to installan Office of Religious Freedom inside the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs is said to be all set to follow through on the promise. In addition, the Ontario Human Rights Commission is preparing to host a community dialogue in January 2012 on human rights relating to religious beliefs in practice. Religious freedom promises to figure prominently in these discussions. The time may therefore be ripe to examine the concept of religious freedom in some detail.

Why religious freedom? Why shouldn’t we be content to let religions thrive on the basis of the numerous freedoms provided by a free society, such as freedom of belief, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and so on, which are available to all citizens whether religiously inclined or not? Why create a separate category for religious freedom? There are several reasons for this: Religion has historical importance, and used to have political power. Philosophically, it occupies a space that requires deference from secular society, as it deals with the ultimate rather than the penultimate. It is also one of the main sources of value formation in the world. As a result, religion deserves respect, and to be accommodated.

The announcement by the city last week that Stanley Park pool would be one of the outdoor pools facing closure could end up costing the city a lot of money.

Last week Mayor Rob Ford introduced a proposed budget that suggested closing seven swimming and wading pools and reducing ice-time hours at local arenas, as a means of reducing costs. Ford said the pools needed extensive repairs.

Later in the week the city released a list of five wading pools and two outdoor pools slated to close.

Stanley Park, which is located near Bathurst Street and King Street West, was on the list.

But the Stanley Park pool underwent an expensive facelift just last year. City documents show $592,000 was spent on repairs and renovations.

The money for the repairs came from all three levels of government — part of Canada's Economic Action Plan — with Ottawa and Queen's Park each contributing $118,800.

Mayor Rob Ford’s zeal to contract out city jobs is set to enter a new phase with the privatization of more road maintenance and grass-cutting across Toronto, the Star has learned.

Mark Ferguson, president of CUPE Local 416, has received notice the city intends to contract out the remaining plowing, salting, grass-cutting and other positions done by city workers in various districts.

That will eliminate the jobs of about 70 city workers whose permanent status, he said, will allow them to “bump down” and claim the jobs of “the most junior of temporary workers.” More than 130 currently vacant jobs would also disappear. Street sweeping would be outsourced for next summer, while winter work would go in 2012-13.

“I don’t know when Ford will stop outsourcing,” Ferguson said in an interview Monday evening. “It’s certainly problematic for our members and Torontonians who rely on the services, and rings true to form with (Councillor) Doug Ford’s vow to contract out everything that’s not nailed down.”

In a Monday morning press conference, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson celebrated the impending passage of the Conservatives’ omnibus crime bill while the president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police suggested it’s time to stop the ‘tough on crime’ message.

“Parliament has seen and debated these measures — some of them for as long as four years,” Nicholson said in anticipation of Bill C-10’s third reading in the House of Commons. “The time for talk is over; the time for action is now. Canadians have given us a strong mandate to build a strong, safer Canada. This legislation does precisely that.”

The Safe Streets and Communities Act re-introduces 9 bills that include measures such as mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession and tougher penalties for young offenders.

As the Conservatives promised during the federal election campaign, they appear poised to meet their goal of passing the legislation within the first 100 sitting days of the parliamentary session.

From the late 1940s through to early in this century, Canada enjoyed a reputation as a determined, capable and effective internationalist. Regardless of which party formed the government, this country actively engaged with other peoples and states in the pursuit of collaborative solutions to the world's major problems and challenges. From the founding of the UN, postwar reconstruction and the Suez crisis to non-proliferation issues, protection of the global commons and working to address the plight of children in conflict, Canada was always present, and, when appropriate, ready to lead.

As Canada's relative power and influence inevitably declined with the recovery of Europe and Asia and the emergence of China, India, Brazil and others, the scale of Canadian activism was downsized. Our enthusiasm for joining others in the pursuit of long-term goals such as eradicating poverty and bringing peace to the world gradually gave way to to smaller, "niche" projects such as the landmine ban, conflict diamonds and the construction of innovative new doctrines such as the Responsibility to Protect. The nature of Canadian internationalism changed with the times, and public diplomacy was mobilized to advance the likes of the Human Security Agenda, but a core commitment to internationalism endured.

OTTAWA — On Wednesday, Canadian President Stephen Harper will fly to Washington for a meeting with American President Barack Obama, where the two are expected to unveil a new border agreement.

Whoops. That should read Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Sorry.

These days it's easy to get confused about the role of Harper, who is nominally the prime minister of a Westminster cabinet government in which the central functions of government are carried out by Parliament.

Over time, under successive prime ministers, power has shifted away from Parliament, but under Harper it has become thoroughly subordinated to the backroom operatives in his office, who wield the real power.

The Scene. James Moore, today’s substitute prime minister, had enough to say about the government’s maybe withdrawing from Kyoto that it was not until his third response to NDP leader Nycole Turmel that he needed to start whining about the actions of a Liberal government that last held office nearly six years ago. Conversely, in response to a question from Bob Rae about the travel habits of Peter MacKay, Moore had but three sentences to offer before he had to start ranting about how terrible the Liberals had been.

So it could be worse. To this rallying cry, the government holds steadfast.

The explanation for Mr. MacKay is altogether more straightforward and thus more complicated.

For the record, the three sentences Mr. Moore offered in Mr. MacKay’s defence were as follows: “Mr. Speaker, we have been clear. The Minister of National Defence returned from a private trip in order to go back to work. Government aircraft are used for government work.”

This much was offered in response to a very specific question from Mr. Rae. “The Minister of National Defence has stated in the House that there was a previously planned search and rescue mission that was the reason for his being picked up by a government helicopter. I would like to ask the government if it could answer this simple question,” Mr. Rae begged. “If it was a previously planned mission, why did Lieutenant Colonel Chris Bowles say on July 7, 2010 ‘this mission will be under the guise of fighter group as search and rescue training?’ If it was a previously planned mission, why would you need a guise?”

The third-party manager sent by the federal government to handle the desperate housing situation in Attawapiskat in northern Ontario has been asked by the band to leave, CBC News has confirmed.

Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence told CBC News that she had informed the band manager of her decision.

"I advised my band manager I don't want them in my community … doesn't work for our community … we should focus on the crisis, not on other things," she said.

The government said earlier it had chosen Jacques Marion, from the accounting and consulting firm BDO Canada, as its third-party manager for Attawapiskat. Marion was to exercise signing authority for all department spending and would decide which band staff are required to run its program and services.

Spence said the minister responsible for First Nations "didn't listen."

Hold onto your toonies, Toronto. You might need them to visit Riverdale Farm, swim in an outdoor pool or borrow a popular movie from the library.

The City of Toronto is looking to shave costs and raise revenue as part of its 2012 budget and new $2 user fees for services that are now free emerged Monday as a key theme in that plan. The new fees – floated during a day-long budget meeting – will be debated later this week and next and, if approved, will go before council next month.

Talk of the new charges is likely to unleash a new wave of budget-cutting protests and, in the case of Riverdale Farm, comes just a few months after council voted unanimously to let a local group work on a new funding plan for the popular family attraction.

Budget chair Councillor Mike Del Grande has made it clear he thinks Toronto has too many “freebies,” and the proposed $2 charge to cool off in an outdoor pool or wander among the cows and pigs at Riverdale Farm are just the latest on his list.

For 12 years, Vladimir Putin has ruled Russia in an increasingly authoritarian manner, slowly squeezing the life out of the country’s political opposition and independent media. His many detractors always struggled to get around the awkward truth that he did so with a large measure of popular support.

By voting for the opposition in large numbers in Sunday’s parliamentary election, Russians across the country signalled they were no longer onside with the direction Mr. Putin was taking the country in. The rebuke to Mr. Putin – who recently announced his plan to return to the Kremlin for up to another 12 years as president – was clear.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets of central Moscow on Monday, calling for “Russia without Putin!” and trying to break through a thick police cordon that blocked them from marching toward the Kremlin. It was the biggest demonstration the Russian capital has seen in years, and more may be on the way as anger spreads over Twitter and other social networking sites. A smaller protest broke out Monday on the Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg.

If not for heavy-handed Kremlin manipulation – including the disqualification of the most vocal opposition parties, the harassment of independent monitors and apparent ballot-box stuffing in Chechnya (where United Russia won an improbable 99.5 per cent of the vote) and other regions – the results of Sunday’s Duma election would surely have been far worse for Mr. Putin’s United Russia party.

OTTAWA—Defence Minister Peter MacKay should come clean or he will face calls for his resignation over a decision to hitch a ride on a search-and-rescue helicopter, opposition parties say.

MacKay brushed off attacks with clipped answers in the House of Commons Monday, while New Democrats and Liberals accused him of lying to the Commons over his 25-minute flight in 2010.

The minister was hoisted up to a CH-149 Cormorant helicopter from near a Newfoundland fishing lodge on July 9, 2010, and taken to Gander airport to catch a Challenger flight. From there he travelled to London, Ont., for a government announcement.

The minister has maintained that he was met by the search-and-rescue crew in order to witness a long-delayed demonstration of the aircraft’s abilities. But emails obtained by the Star last week showed an air force official ordered the ride to be carried out “under the guise” of a training mission only after MacKay made his request for the trip.

MacKay did not refer to any pre-planned demonstration Monday, but said “any suggestion that there was a re-tasking or diversion of search-and-rescue aircraft from their actual tasking is simply untrue.”

Liberal interim leader Bob Rae said the minister was “like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.”